Stop reading now. This is the best part of this blog.

The news came in the form of a phone call from one of the parties involved. It was a sad goodbye, letting us know that our couples/family friendship, which we both enjoyed, was no longer. Their marriage was over. The culprit, of course, was sex.

I won’t pretend to empathize with either party. The pain they both must be going through is beyond my frame of reference. I won’t belittle it by offering platitudes. All I could do was offer condolences, reaffirm the “you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do”, and re-emphasize that although the nature of our friendship will never be the same, my love will still be there, unchanged.

The totality of the news, taken in all its context, left me feeling ugly and defeated. Couple friends where the moms, dads and kids all get along simultaneously are hard to…

Two harmless little words. Together they sound almost… cute. Harmless. Docile. Innocent. For a while, this was the only term I had ever heard to describe what I was feeling, although the words themselves never quite seemed to adequately express how awful the feeling really is.

Recently though, I’ve learned that (most likely), what I’m actually experiencing is called “Mild Cognitive Impairment” (MCI). By definition, it’s a sort of transitional period between a normal functioning mind and full-blown Alzheimer’s. But even those words still don’t really encompass the true feeling of it all; the scary moments when you simply can’t understand what someone said, or you forget names you’ve known for years, or get confused by the simplest things that you never had and issue understanding before.

I think probably one of the best examples of this is something that happens frequently to me: I’m a smoker (yes…